


Alive And Burning Brighter

by Memories_of_the_Shadows



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Defenders (Marvel TV), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Always female, Bisexual Female Character, Casual misogyny, Closeted Character, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, Mostly Gen, Not A Fix-It, Patriarchy, Scars, Sexism, Strong Female Characters, Suicidal Thoughts, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-06-30 02:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15742083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Memories_of_the_Shadows/pseuds/Memories_of_the_Shadows
Summary: She’s almost died three times and she is a Stark.  Stark men are made of iron, but she is a Stark woman and she is made of steel.  Nothing is going to make her break.





	Alive And Burning Brighter

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "I Am The Fire" by Halestorm, but seriously this entire song is this fic. I love it.

Stark men are made of iron. She hates that phrase. _Stark men are made of iron_.

Well, she’s not a man, and she’s not inferior to anyone or anything. If Stark men are made of iron, Stark women are made of _steel_.

It’s a new rule. Howard can choke on it, on all his useless insults and obsessions with Captain America. Antonia Margaret Stark is all of thirteen when she decides she can’t take the _delicate flower_ nonsense her nanny tries anymore.

Four years later, Toni is graduating from MIT top of her class, beating out every single boy who thought her pair of gorgeous tits made her dumb by a landslide and having met her best friend in the entire world--the only man there who’d looked at her brain and not her body, too bad her platypus’d never look twice at her.

Five years after that, her world shatters.

///////////

Toni is a disaster, but she’s learned to be a disaster in private.

The world doesn’t care that Stark Industries owes sixty percent of their patents--eighty-four percent of the most lucrative ones at that--to Toni’s genius.

They care who and how much she fucks, what she wears, how she looks. (How she looks is fucking _perfect_ , and if Obie hints at her going on a diet one more time because she inherited her mother’s curves and isn’t a stick figure like the models Obie likes to bring home she _will_ start screaming and never stop.)

So she hides her ever growing list of liaisons--both men _and_ women, yet another thing she needs to hide because the public is both fickle and conservative when it comes to the youngest female CEO ever--stops taking drugs and drinking herself into blackouts every night through sheer force of medically inadvisable will, and hires Pepper Potts to cover everything else Toni misses.

She misses a lot, but Pepper is the best. Without Pepper and JARVIS and Rhodey, Toni would have self-destructed herself _and_ her company before she ever made it to twenty-five.

Pepper gets her through it, and Toni is thirty-two when Pepper helps her wrest control of Stark Industries from Obie.

It’s not really something she wants to do--if she could just stay in the R&D department for the rest of her life that would be great, thanks--CEO means parties she can’t enjoy, scrutiny she’d rather avoid, and far, far too many people thinking they’re entitled to her time.

Her Honey-bear--not that she can call him that in public anymore, not after that last scandal nearly lost him his consultant position at SI--tells her they keep finding her weapons in the hands of people she doesn’t sell them to. Pepper tells her that some of SI’s budgets don’t look right. JARVIS tells her that someone is trying to hack him, someone with access codes. She tells them she’ll look into it, but she already knows who it is.

And when she’s kidnapped after a missile demonstration in Afghanistan at age thirty-three--a full five years sooner than in another world, a different one--Toni doesn’t need to see the leader of this little band of terrorists to know who’s behind it.

She does anyway, and she tells Obadiah Stane that he should have done her a favor and died with Howard. Her breasts are a ruin of shrapnel and blood and she’s laughing at the pure fury on his face as she passes out.

///////////////

They make her cover her hair, but they don’t touch her because as much as it burns and boils her to do it--because she’s a contrary bitch when she’s angry but she’s not _suicidal_ , and the car battery powered super magnet in her chest is her second chance--Toni complies.

None of them are smart enough to think of her as the threat and she’s a good enough actress after an entire life in the spotlight hiding secrets in her shadow that playing meek and biddable comes easily enough.

Yinsen is the only one who sees through the ruse.

“So, you’re a woman that has everything and nothing?” he says to her. The guards are gone, satisfied with just a spot of torture because she ‘accidentally’ tripped one who was coming to close to the armor she has hidden in a missile shell.

Toni’s hair is wet and sticky, the headscarf smells vile, and she clutches every second of pain and humiliation to her chest and forges it into a will of diamond and the molten heat of her anger into a spine of steel, the pressure of forcing it away scalding away the dross, making it purer.

“Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.”

She survives this, of course she does, because Stark women are made of _steel_ , and now she has the armor to prove it.

//////////////

She’s Toni Fucking Stark and she can’t care about nothing anymore, so she’s also Iron Man.

The news still call her the Merchant of Death even though the _moment_ she could after Afghanistan she halted production of weapons and converted all those factories into making StarkPhones and any other of their many patents that aren’t weapons.

(They may have a point, but no ones connected her to the violent ending of every single Ten Rings cell she and JARVIS can locate. Her reputation’s the last thing she’s going to worry about.)

Obadiah is in prison, her platypus found her, JARVIS is smarter and more human than ever, and Pepper is still at her side.

Toni _needs_ Pepper, needs her more than loves her, and she would do anything for the other woman. Pepper doesn’t feel the same, but she stays anyway.

Life is good.

//////////////

Life is ending.

It feels like a joke when Toni finds the palladium content in her blood, but she can’t care about herself anymore.

Nobody sees her, nobody _wants_ to see her, see past the persona she puts up to the actual mess of a person beneath. She puts so much makeup on to look something even approaching normal in the necklines she prefers and the tabloids call her a whore when they see how much she has caked on.

She’s dying and nobody knows and Toni isn’t sure most of them would care if they did. Pepper is a better CEO than she ever was, eliminating the pay gaps and streamlining SI into something that Toni wishes had happened years ago.

Natalie Rushman is pretty, and sweet, and kind, and, best of all, discreet. She ends up being the first woman Toni takes to bed since Afghanistan and the first lover since then who doesn’t care about the scars and the arc reactor.

The arc reactor is killing her, but Toni’s not sure that won’t be for the better. Natalie convinces her to have fun, to let go for once, and Toni does all the stupid things she hasn’t in over a decade--driving fast cars, drinking too much, drugs, wearing clothes that have more holes and grease in them then actual cloth--because it won’t kill her, won’t ruin her reputation anymore than dying will. No, the one thing keeping her alive is what’s killing her.

Agent Agent reveals that Natalie is just a spy sent by SHIELD and threatens to kill Toni--which a taser to her arc reactor _would_ do in her condition and would be a relief at this point--and then gives her the information which eventually saves her life.

(Howard’s message, saying Toni is his greatest creation, is bittersweet because he actually _cared_ even if he never said it, but she owes who she is to _no one_. She’s Toni Fucking Stark and she created herself.)

When Vanko is in prison and SHIELD is removed from all SI holdings with extreme prejudice, Toni calls a press conference and comes out as bisexual to the entire world, Pepper, Happy, and Rhodey at her side. SI stock drops but Pepper is proud of her, Happy rolls his eyes at the protestors who stake out her tower, and Rhodey whispers to her that she’s a hero and the suit doesn’t matter.

It’s a little more selfish than that--fuck that bitch, Natasha, and fuck Coulson for ordering a honey-pot against her--but it makes her feel a little warm and gooey inside anyway. Like hell will she let SHIELD hold who she is over her head like a guillotine when Toni doesn’t care what people will think anymore.

(She doesn’t use any make-up on her scars or the lingering palladium veins during the conference. Some of the news reports are scathing in their judgement of them, but Toni would rather focus on the letters she gets from other survivors, their stories of learning to love their bodies again. It helps her swallow the ache that her platypus’ words create behind the arc reactor.)

She’s almost died three times and she is a Stark. Stark men are made of iron, but she is a Stark woman and she is made of steel. Nothing is going to make her break.

///////////////

Toni takes SHIELD’s Avenger initiative and makes it better. That’s what she does.

Instead of beholden to SHIELD--none of whom Toni trusts farther than she can throw them without her suit--she gathers people who SHIELD overlooked, people who are doing good but… smaller goods. Less noticeable, maybe.

Her honey-bear brings her to meet Carol Danvers, who is gorgeous, and strong, and more than a match for all the stories her Aunt Peggy told her about the person SHIELD built the idea of the Initiative around.

Pep introduces her to Matt Murdock, and Jeri Hogarth, who brings in Jessica Jones. Both of them are a little more broken, a little more violent than Carol or the people that SHIELD wanted, but Toni knows some people deserve to die.

Happy takes her around to Luke Cage’s bar and lets them hash it out. Then he calls up Logan to pick up the pieces.

Maybe none of them are really friends--except, Toni and Jessica love being snarky assholes to each other, Rhodey and Danvers get along like only career military people can, and Logan very quickly becomes Cage’s best customer after Jessica--but they work _well_ together, so much so that when Captain America is found and SHIELD tries their hand at controlling them again, Toni’s team absorbs the recruits that SHIELD gives them instead of the other way around.

Even Natasha. Even Clint. And if Toni notices the way her platypus trips over himself when the archer engages him in a prank war, or the way Barton laughs to himself whenever Cap starts asking Rhodey to curb her more wild and crazy ideas that were his to begin with, well she knows better than to say anything. Maybe when the world becomes more comfortable she can congratulate them on finding each other.

(She’ll hate Barton so intensely in the future that it makes her feel more like a sword than any other betrayal, any other bit of damage the Avengers who side with Cap manage to do to her homes and heart. She’ll hate him right up until he realizes what it is that his guilt over not being able to save Wanda’s brother may cost him, when her Rhodey falls out of the sky and Clint surrenders on the spot just so she’ll tell him if he’s alright.

He ends up on house-arrest in her tower, but her honey-bear manages to forgive him, so Toni’ll consider it. Natasha, who disappears into thin air and sides with no one, will never get a third chance and neither will Rogers. Toni holds their betrayals close to her heart and uses the scar from the shield to remind herself of what comes from trusting too much without a back-up plan.)

The Avengers are large, and not all of them are there all the time, but when the Chitauri are led by Loki against Earth they answer her call to battle.

////////////////

Somehow, at the end of everything, Toni Stark is still forty-eight years old when she ends up on a dead planet, covered in dust that used to be the only kid she had that she didn’t program herself, so many light years away from the only world she’s ever known.

She’d forgotten that even steel shatters under the right conditions. Cold and alone, injured and defenseless, these feel like the right conditions.

Half of all populations, everywhere, and what are the chances that Thanos would manage to take everything she’s ever cared about away from her? Pep, Rhodey, Peter, the Avengers, _Earth_.

Toni’s lost count of how many times she’s almost died by now, and here she is, staring up at an unfamiliar sky where nothing she is matters anymore, so why is _she_ here and not anyone else?

“Are you done?” Nebula asks, voice as scathing as ever. It reminds her of Jessica and Toni wonders who on Earth survived Thanos.

With her luck, it would be nobody she loved. “Please, don’t let my grief disturb you, I’ll try and have my breakdown a little quieter,” she quips back, but her heart isn’t in it.

Nebula makes an irritated noise in the back of her throat. It sounds like gears grinding and makes Toni think about all the wonders of technology she’s seen and blown up the past couple of days. She can’t even appreciate the science because it keeps trying to kill her. “You aren’t the only one who’s lost someone, my sister is _dead_ , but I will not rest until I have carved every pound of flesh from Thanos’ body that he has taken from me. Now, will you help me or _not_?”

She looks at Nebula. She’s not exactly what Toni’d call pretty, but the blue of her skin, the jut of her cheekbones, the silver of her implants, and her smooth baldness make Nebula striking enough that Toni can’t quite look away. But it’s the hard, cold determination on her face that makes Toni sit up, try and gather the will that got her through all the shit her life has thrown at her and piece it back into something stronger.

“I couldn’t save the world,” she mumbles, and it’s the only apology she can voice even though no one can hear it, “but I can avenge it.” Louder, she says, “Yeah, I’ll help.” Nebula hands Toni what looks to be a solder, and she feels her face set into hard lines, echoing Nebula’s own. Steel can be melted, smelted into something better. Harder. Stronger. She’s not alone.

They’ll destroy Thanos. Hopefully there’ll be enough left of the universe after that to save.

**Author's Note:**

> I just had way too many Tony Stark feels and wondered what life would be like if he was female--as I do when I am given far too much leeway in choosing my own prompts *side-eyes my HP fic writing history*--and how that would change his behaviour. Cause it would, like ninety percent of what Tony Stark gets away with would be career ending for a woman. Anyway, I hope y'all like it, I enjoyed writing this, it was a lot of fun.
> 
> And yes, the end pairing is Nebula/Tony, I actually like that pairing a lot and its even better when it's femmeslash.
> 
> Come visit me at my [tumblr](https://sachinighte.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
